


The In-Between

by thesearchforbluejello



Series: In-Between [2]
Category: Whiskey Cavalier (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Romance, first of all yikes, the sequel no one asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 11:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18619315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesearchforbluejello/pseuds/thesearchforbluejello
Summary: He’s known it the whole time. It’s like holding onto a firework.





	The In-Between

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to _Call Me By My Name_ that no one asked for but I ended up writing anyway. I loved that ending, but somehow ended up with this.

She opens the door with her car keys and a bottle of wine in hand but freezes as soon as she sees him. She presses the wrist of the hand still holding the wine to her mouth to stifle a laugh as she pushes the door closed, keys chiming against the wood. “What is _that_?” she gasps. 

He holds his arms up, spoon in hand. “Richmond gave it to me!”

“And you actually wear it?!” she laughs.

He looks down at the apron, studying the pale pink with its white polka dots for a moment. “Well, yeah. It covers my shirt in case of food splatters, and pink is a very flattering color on me. It really brings out my eyes.” She looks at him skeptically but he can read the amusement in her poorly stifled smile. “Come here. You'll see,” he says, waving her closer with the spoon. She sets her keys on the table and brings the bottle of wine toward the kitchenette, all the while still eying him skeptically. She puts the wine on the counter and leans a hip against the cabinet a little more than an arm's length away from him. “You've got to get closer,” he says, “it's all in the lighting. See? Perfect light, right here.” He can tell that she's trying not to smile. “Look. Like emeralds.” She's still smirking and she rolls her eyes, but she's moved close enough that he only has to lean forward to kiss her. 

There's a moment of hesitation in the space between one heartbeat and the next before she kisses him back. He knows her well enough to expect it, to know that it's a conscious decision for her to accept this intimacy. 

She does, though, and as she slides her hands up his back he knows that this is the difficulty here. She has to decide, constantly, to let him in. It's not about the physical intimacy, not really; at this point he’s _very_ sure that she enjoys having sex with him. They read each other so well, in that as in most things, that it's probably the best sex he's ever had. Selfishly he hopes it is for her, too, even though he hasn't asked. 

It's the emotional intimacy she struggles with; the very same thing that comes so naturally to him is a constant battle for her, but it’s a battle she’s fighting for him.

It's enough for now that she's here and that she's kissing him in the kitchen as he cooks. 

He always thought he was an all-or-nothing kind of man, and he thinks he still is, but this is something so powerful that even on the edge of it where he stands now it feels endless and dangerous as it yaws out beyond what he can foresee. This, he thinks, could be real love. 

Slow love. 

He hasn't asked her if she feels it too, if she feels unbalanced, because he knows she does but he doesn't know if it's the same. He can't ask her and that he knows too. It takes effort for her to give herself to him and it takes effort for him to hold himself back. He knows they have to meet in the middle and if they do so successfully without anything getting in the way then maybe they'll be lucky enough to move forward together. 

He always thought that she was right and it would take them a bottle of tequila and a lapse in judgement before anything happened between them, but it turns out that all it took was a little whiskey, a little rum, and six months of raw heartache. No lapse in judgement, though, just decision, and one Will doesn’t regret in the slightest. Though it had been Frankie who’d taken that first step.

She moves away from him with a smile and reaches for the cabinet over the stove. He doesn't have wine glasses so she pulls down the only two glasses he has. They're more suited to whiskey or bourbon than wine and they make him miss his old life, his real life, where his apartment sits untouched with the wine glasses still in the cabinet. Frankie’s not there, though, she's here, and he'd give up wine glasses for her any day without a second thought. She looks up to see his thoughts written clearly on his face and looks away again as her smile fades. 

“You really don't think it suits me?” he asks and the tension bends. She looks up again at the non sequitur. He gestures to the apron with the spoon. “I think it's slimming.” She laughs at that and the smile is back as the tension breaks.

“It's… bold,” she agrees, wearing skepticism again even if he can see that it’s an act.

“Exactly. Trendsetting.”

“Trendsetting,” she repeats. A smile breaks the false skepticism and she lets it fall away. 

She takes the corkscrew from the drawer and pops the cork from the wine bottle as Will stirs the sauce. He watches her as she pours the wine into the glasses that are shaped all wrong, at ease beside him, unguarded and relaxed. It’s difficult for him, sometimes, to hold back. He’s never had to before, or at the very least he never has, even when he maybe should’ve. But now he’s wary of every misstep, every moment in which he could say or do the wrong thing and shatter this fragile, budding thing between them because he knows it’s still brittle. Sometimes it’s frustrating. And sometimes he’s scared. But other times he wants to forget everything and throw caution to the wind like a fistful of sand thrown by a child who doesn’t know it’s going to blow back in his face. 

“The woman at the store told me this would be perfect,” Frankie says, turning the bottle so she can study the label. “I think she was just flirting with me, though.” She takes an evaluating sip of the wine. “Wow,” she says, looking at it in surprise. Will reaches for the second glass but she snatches it before he can. “I don’t think I’m sharing,” she says.

Will grabs her around the waist with the hand that isn’t holding the spoon and pulls her backward towards him before she can walk away with the glasses. She takes the step willingly and he puts down the spoon. He kisses her neck and she laughs a little breathlessly as she shivers. He skates his other hand across her abs as he moves his lips against her neck and his fingers catch under the hem of her shirt, tracing accidentally along the waistband of her jeans. She starts a little at the contact and surprises him. He stops kissing her and tries to watch her face as he traces the same motion again, but she’s looking away from him. She shivers again and tenses.

“Will,” she says in warning.

He does it again anyway, a touch as gentle as he can manage, just barely brushing his fingers against her skin. She puts the glasses back on the counter in a sudden motion and grabs his hand, twisting his wrist and wrenching his arm back in one fluid motion. She takes a step to the side of him and backwards, locking his arm up behind his back and shoving him toward the counter until he’s pinned between her and the cabinets. She moves so quickly that he’s caught entirely off guard. 

“Are you _ticklish_?” he laughs in disbelief as he tries to look over his shoulder at her. 

“No,” she snaps.

“You _are_!”

“No I’m not!”

He takes a step backwards, using a knee to push away from the cabinets. It puts her off balance and she eases the hold on his arm as she catches herself, surprised. He pulls free of her grasp and turns to face her, reaching out to grab her with an arm around her waist and a hand on the back of her head as he hooks her ankles from under her with his heel and drops her backwards onto the vinyl floor tiles. She falls easily and lets him take her weight as he guides her down. She wraps an arm around his neck and pulls herself closer to kiss him as he kneels over her. 

He slips his hands under her shirt and as she kisses him, sweetbitter like wine, he tickles her.

She breaks the kiss with a gasp and squirms as she tries to escape. He settles his weight more firmly over her to keep her in place. 

“Stop it,” she snaps. The intimidation is wholly ruined when she giggles, a short sound that escapes like a hiccup. It just encourages him. “Will, _stop_ ,” she gasps between giggles. 

“Do you need me to stop?” he asks. He doesn’t know if her reaction is preventing him from reading fear and for a moment he worries.

“Need?” she gasps. “No.”

“Okay,” he says with a grin that she can’t see because her eyes are pressed shut as she laughs. Tears are escaping the corners of her eyes and she’s wriggling beneath him as she tries to escape his grasp. She’s giggling so hard she’s shaking. He knows that there are so many ways she could hurt him. But he knows she won’t.

She reaches an arm up across his shoulders and he slips his arms around her and sits them up because he can read what she’s asking in that gesture. She moves easily with him, adjusting herself in his lap. He kisses her and moves one hand up her thigh, brushing his palm along the denim of her jeans as he slips the other beneath her shirt to tickle her again. She jumps at the contact and digs her heels into his back, breaking the kiss with a gasp again. Will presses his forehead against hers as she catches her breath. He reaches up behind him and shuts the stovetop off. She bumps her nose against his and giggles again and this time he’s not even tickling her.

He wants to sink in this moment with her and never surface again. For a second, he almost convinces himself it’s possible. 

“You’re going to have to take this off,” she says, tugging with one hand at the apron where it’s tied behind his neck.

“The apron or my shirt?” he says even though he knows exactly what she means.

“Both.”

She laughs and she tastes sweet like salt where her tears have traced her lips and Will thinks that this is truly what it means to drown.

He breaks the kiss to smile at her and she smiles back. It fades after a moment into something more pensive, more wary, and she scratches her nails gently through the hair at the base of his skull. She looks like she wants to say something and the smile melts into an expression fond and gentle and it’s the truest part of her he’s ever seen. She takes a breath like she’s going to speak and the phone rings.

Her brow furrows and she turns her head toward where she’d set her phone.

Will threads his fingers in her hair and turns her face back toward him. “Just ignore it.” Since her cover was blown two weeks ago she’s gone in for several debriefings at the field office, but her time at the school is over so he doesn’t care who’s calling her.

Her fingers are working at the apron’s tie where it’s knotted behind his neck. “How did you _tie_ this?”

“My Scout Master’s specialty,” he says to her throat.

She laughs in the silence left when the phone stops ringing. 

She’s managed to get the tie undone when the phone rings again. She stands from him with an irritated growl. Will reaches back for the other tie on the apron and disentangles it.

“Hello?” she says and he’s incredibly self-satisfied that she sounds a little breathless. 

He sees the change in body language crackle through her as she turns away from him and the heat that’s been pooling low and hot in his belly turns cold. Her back straightens and her shoulders tense; her breathing is suddenly more even, carefully controlled. 

Will knows she’ll be forced to break his heart.

He’s known it the whole time. It’s like holding onto a firework.

“Yes sir,” Frankie says and the vinyl floor is suddenly very cold beneath him. She pulls the phone away from her ear and stares at it for a moment, still facing away from him. The sounds of the street are loud like static below them. She puts the phone on the counter and takes two very slow, controlled breaths before she turns to face him.

Her face had been wet with tears before, when she was laughing, and he knows she’s telling herself that this is still why. Her expression tells him all he needs to know. It’s devastation he sees pasted across her face as much as she’s trying and failing to construct something to hide it and suddenly he is very sure that he knows exactly what she was going to say to him. Three words he’s sure she’s never said to anyone that are now lost to time and fate and the cruelty of events playing out on a chessboard checkered like this ugly vinyl floor.

It's not slow love, because he was lying to himself in thinking that they didn’t have too much baggage for that, but maybe it could've been. With time they no longer have.

She’s taken two steps towards him but moves no closer. He reaches a hand up in invitation, in need, in offering. She takes it and he pulls her with gentle pressure towards him. She settles in his lap again and he just holds her, the steady pressure of her body against his, her arms around him and his around her and he tells himself that this is comfort.

He knows she’ll leave.

She’d said she wouldn’t, but there’s no choice now.

His orders were vague but hers, clearly, were not and he knows by her reaction what she was told.

He presses his face into her shoulder and knows that there are four words he’ll never get to say back to her because the in-between has shattered around them, fragile and fleeting.

The city is loud like static below them.

They sit with no space between them, with a mile and a moment and a hundred thousand secrets and they wait to lose each other.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry.


End file.
